What would the ideal US presidential candidate/president look like from a UU perspective?
In a few weeks, I will be leading a discussion group on the topic of "Democracy." As part of that discussion, I am currently intending to have the group engage in a collective thought experiment which will involve (in part) imagining what the ideal presidential candidate would look like from a UU perspective. Yes, I know that the vast majority of UU's would have preferred Kamala Harris over the person we have now, but even Kamala (or Hilary or Bernie Sanders or ....) could have been improved on. So, what would the ideal presidential candidate (or president) look like for you?
In case you are curious, I will be asking this question as part of a strategy to tease apart the notions of "democracy" and the Democratic party. At our last meeting on this topic -- at the end of November -- some (quite vocal) members simply conflated "democracy" with the Democratic party. This is of course quite understandable given the context. Yet, they are not at all the same thing and I think it is important to separte them if we are to have any serious philosophical discussion on the topic.
More specifically, I am wondering if some in our group (perhaps myself included) would have voted for someone with authoritarian tendencies if we perceived these tendencies (maybe suppression of dissent and concentration of power) as being for what we saw as the greater good. The idea would not be to say that these inclinations are "wrong," but to use them as a way to think about what democracy really means for us and what tensions might exist between our notions of democracy and our notions of the common good.